''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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clown (IB, 104-105). And the occasion on which
Cincinnatus is for the first time allowed to look
through the peephole at the mysterious M'sieur
Pierre imperceptibly changes into a scene in a
laboratory, where the professor allows people, who
are patiently queueing up, to look at something won-
derful under the microscope (IB, 52).
One thinks of Strindberg's introductory note to
A Dreamplay, one of the plays that Esslin lists among
the predecessors of the Theatre of the Absurd:
the
... author has sought to reproduce the
disconnected but apparently logical form
öf a dream. Anything can happen; everything
is possible and probable. Time and
space do not exist. On a slight groundwork
of reality, imagination spins and weaves
new patterns, unfettered fancies, absurdities
and improvisations. The characters
are split, double and multiply; they evapor.
ate,
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crystallize, scatter and converge.
These phenomena undoubtedly have their comic sides,
and it is precisely their irreality and dreamlike
quality that produces the comic effect. Being the
stuff of dreams, they combine in such a way as to form
the apparent nonsense of dreams, in which logic, at
first sight, seems allowed no part at all, and where
ample scope is given to the comic non-sequitur.
According to Freud, very similar mechanisms are at
work when dreams are born, as when jokes are composed.
In Jokes, these are often mechanisms of condensation
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processes of "telescoping"22, by which separate, even
disparate words or elements of words are linked, and
relations between seemingly disconnected things and